Category: Libraries and Librarians

I spent the weekend crunching numbers (in the hopes of being able to make some meaning out of the survey responses in our CMS evaluation project) and reading Our Underachieving Colleges by Derek Bok (the once and current president of Harvard). The CMS eval headache will have to wait for its own post. Let just say “The Saga Continues.” But Bok’s book is fascinating.

As part of his look at the history of colleges and universities in this country and how they’ve arrived at the curricular and pedagogical methods currently in vogue, he points out that most curricular reviews take place in the complete absence of a clear and defined list of goals. Nobody has mapped out what colleges should be teaching their students in the course of four years, or, if they have, the curriculum does not actually support those goals. So Bok lists 8 goals that he thinks are actually actionable as well as being universally important. According to Bok, institutions teaching undergraduates should be teaching:

• The ability to communicate
• Critical thinking
• Moral reasoning
• Preparation for citizenship
• Living with diversity
• Living in a global society
• Breadth of interest
• Preparation for work

Of these, he says, teaching “Critical Thinking” is a goal held by the greatest number of faculty.

Nationwide polls have found that more than 90 percent of faculty members in the United States consider it [teaching critical thinking] the most important purpose of undergraduate education. In view of the wide variety of interests and backgrounds represented in a typical college faculty, such a strong consensus is impressive (pages 67-68).

But what constitutes critical thinking? See if you can see the librarian’s role in this list of skills from page 68 of Bok’s book.

…an ability to reorganize and define problems clearly, to identify the arguments and interests on all sides of an issues, to gather relevant facts and appreciate their relevance, to perceive as many plausible solutions as possible, and to exercise good judgment in choosing the best of these alternatives after considering the evidence and using inference, analogy, and other forms of ordinary reasoning to test the cogency of the arguments.

After reading this list and recognizing in it those ACRL information literacy standards that just haven’t been resonating with my faculty, I began to wonder why librarians have chosen to develop their own jargonized definition of a habit of mind that faculty obviously feel very strongly about. Why can’t we draw upon the vocabulary that faculty are already using to show that developing sophisticated student scholarship (which is the classroom interpretation of information literacy) is part of critical thinking? Why can’t we make an argument for integrating this type of critical thinking into curriculum because it is the content faculty are teaching rather than something extra that has to be crammed into syllabi? So far, I’ve been able to “convert” one faculty member to this view… only 200 or so more to go.

Comments closed

I’m torn. I love the idea of tagged catalogs and user comments, but I’m also still in my honeymoon period with controlled vocabulary (having only graduated from library school 11 months ago). I guess I’m stuck here in the middle on the vocabulary issue just like I’m suspended between genX and genY.

For me, it all comes down to control and trust. Well, it may also have something to do with the fact that I’m located at a four-year college, so trust becomes even more of an issue. I’ve seen the notes scribbled in the margins of used books I’ve bought (most notably the copy of Frankenstein I read in grad school in which some over-eager and under-informed student had wondered which child Shelley was pregnant with when she made reference to a “pregnant pause”). I’ve seen the chalk scribbles on the college walkways proclaiming that world peace can be achieved by … um … love — very, very explicit love.

I want to trust that tagging would be a powerful and vibrant addition to a catalog. If my library said they’d be instituting user tagging tomorrow, I’d go for it with good spirit and gusto. But I’d also have nagging doubts. A month ago, though, I also had nagging doubts about the usefulness of blogs….

Well, this has gotten a lot longer than I intended, but I was thinking a lot about this as I sat at the reference desk tonight. I’d gone back to look at a message I’d saved from the O’Reilly Radar about Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture which contained this quote:

The secret of Wikipedia’s content-generating process, Wales explained, is the nurturing and shaping of trust, instead building everything around distrust.

I think nurturing and shaping of trust is the heart and soul of the library of the future. I also think that the “nurturing and shaping” of trust does not mean giving up all control (which, to be fair, has never been intimated by anyone I’ve heard talk about the subject). Plants don’t often flourish if they’re simply dumped on the ground. They require feeding, watering, weeding, and sometimes even training. I’m eager to see what my somewhat unruly users could do for resource discovery if given the proper environment and ideal amount of training and oversight (what ever that “ideal” amount might be).

Comments closed